Yearly Archives: 2007

The Essentials in China

I received a note the other day. It was from my editor at Wiley informing me that …

The PEG

Most stock market traders are familiar with the PE ratio. That is current price divided by the …

The implications of index trading

Something came up recently in one of the forums I visit from time to time. It had …

Understanding the value of trade

This post goes a bit off the normal path, but it’s something I’ve had on my mind …

news

Ways to approach news events in your trading

News and data events can be very disruptive forces for traders and their performance.

You want to know what kind of returns you can make?

I saw that question again – “How much can I make….?” There are numerous variations on it, …

Understanding the different types of market participants

“…market behavior is the sum total of the actions of all of its individual participants and disciplines …

Approaches to exiting trades

I had a question the other day from a member of my trading systems course in regards to getting …

MIP

Book Review: Markets in Profile

A book that can make a huge difference in the way you look at the markets

prices

Where do prices come from?

Want to understand where the prices you see coming across your trading platform come from? The blog post should help clarify things for you.

What are your trading expectations?

One of the more common questions you can see on any trading forum relates to profitability and …

How did you pick your market?

There’s a good chance that most people reading this post either are or have been stock traders. …

Close stops do not lower your risk

A lot of new traders fall in to an insidious little trap. Because they hear from those …

What leverage is really all about

I brought up the topic of leverage a couple months ago in my post How much leverage …

Fundamental trading vs trading on fundamental information

There appears to be a level of confusion among new traders regarding the meaning of fundamental trading. …

Fundamental trading book recommendation

Last night I hosted a live call featuring guest speaker Jeoff Hall of IFR Markets. The focus of the …

Trading competitions are games, nothing more

This week CNBC kicked off it’s Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge. They’ve put plugging the stock trading competition …

Make sure your instincts match your environment

Well, my time out west is nearly at its end. It’s back to the Northeast first thing …

The value and usefulness of inflation data

Yesterday the US CPI inflation figures were released. There was, predictably, much talk about the figures on …

Accept and recognize your mistakes

One of the things that can cause major problems in your trading is the failure to accept …

How many pips do you make?

I’m active in the forex market, as you may be aware. While I also trade the stock …

Looking at volatility, historically speaking

There has been a ton of talk in the markets about the lack of volatility lately. Bill over …

Charting, data and the bid/offer spread

An important element in market analysis and in the development of and testing for trading systems is understanding …

moneystack

Trading for a Living vs Trading for Wealth Building

This posts looks at how trading for a living and trading for the purpose of increasing your wealth can differ.

Never expand your timeframe

One of the things that falls in to the category of hoping the market is going to …

Stock market industry sectors and included stocks

I was asked the following question yesterday: “Where can I find a list of the sector indices, …

Fear is healthy, greed is good

In this overly sensitive day and age it is commonly said that in order to get the …

Stop-hunting is NOT the problem some people say

A topic that comes up a lot on forex discussion forums is “stop hunting”, though it isn’t …

Golf and Trading – Learning from Tiger

I’m not a golfer. The extent of my playing has been a whopping total of 9 holes, …

You don’t have to trade you know

I came across a headline yesterday while flipping through the collection of blogs I normally skim. It …

Trade real money, not paper money

In the last chapter of The Essentials of Trading I wrote something that many people would consider …

brainquestion

How much leverage to use? Wrong question!

I see the question about what the best level of leverage is for someone to use in their trading, but it’s not the right question at all. This post is about what the right question really is.

The easiest and stupidest way to lose money

I did it again. I made a stupid mistake on an order entry yesterday afternoon and sure enough it cost me money.

Keep your head from ruining perfectly good trades

I was recently responding to a post on one of the discussion forums I frequent that I …

Knowing the high volume forex trading timeframes

An extremely frequent question I see in the forex discussion boards and that I get in my conversations …

Easy stock option trading

Several years ago I stopped trading stocks all together. After more than a decade in the market …

Trader interaction and information sharing

Of late I have been fairly active on the net looking at trading websites of various types, …

Is it investing? Or is it trading?

On one of the forums I read and sometimes contribute to a young market professional posted an inquiry about …

Trading Systems Defined

In my previous two posts I outlined my thoughts on some topics related to trading systems, especially …

Taking a closer look at trading system win rate

Yesterday I wrote about the three elements needed to assess and compare trading systems (Thoughts on Trading System …

Thoughts on Trading System Performance

I was recently alerted to some commentary on trading system design and backtesting. That grabbed my attention …

Trade Commodities without Trading Futures

In 2006 we saw the advent of currency exchange traded funds (ETFs). They are instruments traded like …

Losing more than your initial account balance

A question came up recently on the topic of whether you could lose more than your initial …

Trade nice children!

One of the things that has long bothered me about the trading community is, in fact, the …

The better you are, the better you want to be

“If you’re any good at all, you know you can be better” – Lindsey Buckingham That’s from …